Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance

Geneticists who study Thoroughbred horses, looking for inheritance patterns of athleticism, have long noticed something called “the Grand Sire Effect.” This is when a gene expression pattern skips a generation—as it has with “Secretariat’s” offsprings’ offsprings. Researchers at the University of Maryland may now have an explanation for how this happens: inheritance of non-coding, double stranded RNA which silence genes in the first generation, but not the second. In effect, this is the transfer of non-genetic information between generations. MORE